Yair Robinson

Kol Nidrei 5787

Looking Ahead with Forgiveness

It is perhaps among the most powerful moments we experience throughout the year. Kol Nidre. The room goes dark, the only light emerging from the aron hakodesh, from the holy ark, which is empty, as members of the leadership hold the sifrei torah. The music rises, first the organ and cello, and then the voices of choir and cantor intone the words we as Jews have recited for generations. It is a beautiful moment, majestic and mysterious, a moment of high drama. Kol Nidrei, words that at first seem to contradict the beauty of the moment, because the words themselves have the quality of a legal formula. We recite: “all obligations, oaths or anathemas. pledges of all names. which we have vowed, sworn, devoted, or bound ourselves to, from this day of atonement, until the next day of atonement (whose arrival we hope for in happiness) we repent of them all. They shall all be deemed absolved forgiven. annulled. void and made of no effect.”

We imagine that these words are part of the teshuvah process; that by reciting Kol Nidre as essentially our first real liturgical words of Yom Kippur, we are resetting ourselves, cleaning our slate, creating for ourselves a kind of fresh canvas as we discard the failures and mistakes of the past. But the text has nothing to do with what was, and everything to do with what will be. The cantor and choir recite, almost hauntingly: “M’yom kippurim zeh ad yom kippurim habah: From this day of atonement until the next day of atonement, we repent of them all”. That is, we look forward in time, not backward, and anticipate, rather than reflect on, our words and promises. And we repent of every false and mistaken word, every promise that will be broken, all of it—in advance.

What a strange thing to recite as we prepare to grieve our actions of the past year. You would think we would recite something that echoes the words of the vidui that we will recite shortly, the confession of our individual and collective failings. You would think that we would pray to wash ourselves clean of all we have done wrong in the past, to make our hearts and lives a tabula rasa so that we may begin again. Instead, we look ahead to the coming year almost sheepishly, as if to say, “we know we can’t help it, we know we will do wrong again, even when given the second chance of Yom Kippur. So may we be forgiven for the coming year’s failings.” How strange, how challenging, and how beautiful.

Yes, beautiful, even in its seeming incoherence. But also challenging. Because it seems to put paid our efforts to make real teshuvah at this season. All of us, I hope, come to Yom Kippur with some sense of wanting to reflect on the past year, repair the damage we may have done, ask forgiveness, and transform ourselves into the kind of people we want to be. We want to return to the right path, the way God wants us to go. We want to see ourselves as good people, even in our flaws. I used the word ‘grieve’ before and I think that is the emotion at hand: we mourn our choices, our missed opportunities to do better; we lament our failings, knowing that we cannot go back in time and undo the damage. We can only move forward, and in doing so, we hope we can heal the hurt we have caused. And yet we begin with a poem that seems to say, “but we will fail again”. What then is our confession? What does it accomplish, save to make us sound like Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, admitting to being plain-dealing villains? How can we put the effort into our teshuvah if we say from the very beginning of the holiday that we disavow our own vows?

What then, are we doing on Yom Kippur, except perhaps assuaging our own guilt, and perhaps making our parents and grandparents happy? What is Kol Nidrei doing relative to our Teshuvah? I want to propose the following possibility: that when we recite Kol Nidrei, we are not excusing our future bad behavior or giving ourselves an ‘out’; rather, we are preparing ourselves for failure. Tomorrow, I’ll be exploring the idea of teshuvah and failure in more depth, and more personally, but at this moment, I want us to see this hymn as a different kind of challenge, one that encourages us forward even as it acknowledges our faults and frailties.

Because Don John’s approach is the coward’s way out, isn’t it? To say in response to some failing on our part, “well, that’s just how I am” is not admitting fault but somehow deciding that the act of correction is irrelevant. It is an act of surrender to our worst instincts; not only to forgive our flaws but to ornament them, pretend that they are, somehow, virtues. And how often do we see our political and spiritual leaders, our leaders in the arts and humanities, refusing to admit fault or repair harm, pretending as if no harm was caused at all by their words or actions? And lest we only point fingers at those at the top, how many of us have resorted to this kind of behavior or found a family member or friend who did the same, retreating into the perceived safety of our weaknesses? Kol Nidrei invites us instead to say instead “I may, despite my best efforts, commit the same mistakes as this year. But I’m trying to get it right.” To acknowledge our failings doesn’t have to mean giving in to them, either. Each of us has struggled, perhaps struggled profoundly, and wanted to give up, wanted to look away, wanted to pretend that our efforts don’t really matter. Our efforts matter, our words matter, our promises matter. Kol Nidrei doesn’t negate our efforts; it doesn’t cancel out our teshuvah or make it meaningless. We may, in fact, regret our vows, or find that we cannot fulfill them. Nevertheless, we strive anyway.

And that’s what makes it beautiful. Not just the soaring music or the lights or seeing the scrolls all out of the ark. What makes it beautiful is that it acknowledges all the ways we know we have failed in the past and our fretting that we may fail in the future, and invites us to see the effort, not dwell on the outcome. We are frail, imperfect, and try as we might, we will fall.

Soon we will recite vidui with the words of Kol Nidrei echoing in our ears. May we acknowledge our past mistakes and strive to correct them; may we recognize our own frailties will lead to new failings and, in acknowledgement of them, strive to perfect ourselves and this world.

. “M’yom kippurim zeh ad yom kippurim habah: From this day of atonement until the next day of atonement, we repent of them all, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying.